Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Elizabeth Wurtzel is not only a very talented writer. She
has become the poster child for the therapy culture.

With age has come wisdom. Experience has taught her how to
overcome the lessons she received from therapy.

Now, she offers some guidance for people who want to become
more likable. She does so by arguing the opposite: she offers some ways you can teach people to hate you.

One might say that it is not a good thing to be hated. One
would be right to say so. But, some people would rather be hated than ignored, so her advice is not altogether ironic.

Wurtzel does not provide a therapeutically correct analysis
of her previous bad behavior. Had she done so, had she used the tool that
therapy has given her, she would have explained that her traumatic childhood forced her o irritate people to the point that they hated her.

Instead, she lists some of her previous bad habits, habits
that she has presumably overcome, and shows how her sense of shame helped her
to overcome them.

With her first point she explains that if you want people to
hate you, you should always be late. Not just a few minutes late, but an hour
or two. Not just occasionally, but all the time.

In a past life Wurtzel had developed the habit. She
describes it:

I used
to be extremely late, mostly because I was slow and distracted, which is what
does it. I would be hours late, for events that were my idea, and even though
everyone was gone by the time I showed up, I did bother, in my ridiculous way.
Mostly I was just something like a half hour or forty-five minutes late, and
people expected it, and somehow forgave it—Lord knows why. No one likes having
to forgive you all the time—they hate being the forever patsy.

How did she overcome this habit? She did so when she
recognized that being late was rude, offensive and abusive:

What
finally set me straight is someone telling me that lateness is nothing more
than a sign of disrespect: It is saying that the other person’s time is not
valuable, he might as well wait for me, what else has he got to do? I had not
thought of it quite that way. I just believed I was slow and distracted, and the
4 train was always delayed, and traffic on Third Avenue was always bad. But
after I realized being late is mean, I learned to wake up earlier and be on
time. People hate me a lot less.

She did not discover the childhood roots of tardiness. She
did not punish herself for being late. She simply came to understand what her lateness
was saying to other people. It might not have been the message she intended to
send, but you do not control the meaning of your messages.

This point should be engraved in the notebook of everyone
who ever tells you to do as you please because no one has a right to judge you.

Wurtzel proceeds to explain that sometimes it happens that
people hate you for being successful. Surely, it cannot be because your success
is rude and abusive, but that does not prevent some people from thinking that
it is.

True enough, people will like you when you succeed because
people always gravitate to success. But many people will resent your success
because it exceeds theirs. They will
even believe that your success was unearned, that you did not gain it honestly.
Surely, you are no better than they are. If you succeeded where they did not,
you must have cheated.

Today, resentment rears its head in the
currently fashionable attack on what is called white privilege.

How do you manage success? Perhaps by being excessively
humble, by not flaunting it. Wurtzel does not quite say it this way, but I am
confident she would agree.

If success is double-edged, failure is not.

No one likes a failure, Wurtzel explains, because failures
bring everyone down. They damage the group reputation and they require
excessive care and tending.

In her words:

Every
family has a mishap who is always broke, can’t keep a job, is in and out of
trouble with the law, is drunk and disorderly mostly at the most inappropriate
times, and in all manner of ways has no capacity to get his life together.
Okay, maybe not every family. Some have several. There are wretched clans who
are all doing time together. But there are lots of lovely people who are stuck
with a miscreant who just can’t get it right, even after all those alternative
summer camps and all that tough love.

Next she says that people will grow to hate you if you are
constantly complaining. She might have mentioned that more than a few people
have cultivated this unfortunate habit in therapy.

Most therapy encourages patients to complain constantly about problems that become more insoluble the more you complain about them:

If
you’re ever about to say, I don’t mean to complain but, don’t. There is nothing
more idiosyncratic than the things that bother you–or the way you express them
or the moment it hits you, but somehow it is going to come out wrong. The
initial filing in a lawsuit is called a complaint, and what is worse than a
lawsuit? Inmates on death row have righteous indignation galore, because you
can justify anything. If there really is a problem, fix it yourself or resolve
it with the powers that be, but don’t make everyone else feel lousy by talking
about it.

In many therapy sessions complaining is legal tender. Many
therapists do not tell their patients to stop complaining. They do not work to
help their patients to fix their problems or to resolve their issues. They are
more interested in knowing how you feel than in what you should do.

When therapists try to help their patients to understand why
they have these problems and not other problems they are encouraging them to
whine. And whining causes people to hate you. So says Wurtzel. I believe she is
right.

Finally, Wurtzel suggests that people will hate you if you
are boring. If you monopolize a conversation with tedious information… often
about yourself… people are not going to like you. If you talk to hear yourself
talk they are going to end up hating you.

Obviously, it takes a certain amount of astute observation
to tell whether people are hanging on your every word or wanting to hang you.
One suspects that you learn it through experience.

In Wurtzel’s words:

There
is nothing wrong with being the center of attention and dominating a dinner
party if that’s how it happens to work out. It is not bad manners to talk too
much if everyone loves listening. But if you are boring, people will hate you
and walk away.

How do you become less boring? Wurtzel has the perfect
antidote:

Usually
people are boring because they are bored. They don’t read or listen to music or
see movies or watch tv or in any way engage. Or worse: They do all that, and
even still. If people tell you that you talk too much, you are boring. So do
something about it. Or keep quiet.

You become less boring when you share information. You become
less boring by reading a lot. You should read
newspapers and magazines, history books and novels. You should listen to music,
go to the movies and watch television. This will give you something to talk about.

When you offer information that everyone can relate to,
when you try to engage people on common ground … you will be contributing to a conversation. You do not need to entertain people, because entertaining
can easily become tedious. You do not need to talk as much as Wurtzel does.

Your conversation should engage others on common ground,
communicating more information than opinions and feelings. You need to
show that you are present but that you are attuned and attentive to other
people.

3 comments:

There must be a lot of projection in all this talk of "people hating you", an insecurity. I mean its an exaggeration, and a narcissistic one at that.

I'd say "acting badly", like being chronically late, represents a defense mechanism where you may in part just be lazy, but also are "testing" the world on your status (and its inner reflection of self-esteem). If you have high status, no one will call you out, (even if they hate your behavior), while if you have low status you might also get away with it because people feel sorry for you (while still hating your behavior).

So there's a strange idea here, that "being hated" is okay and encouraged, perhaps because it externalizes existing unacceptable self-hate. So if others hate you, and yet still accept you, there's a blind bridge that says you can hate yourself and accept yourself.

But as long as its someone else's hate you're worried about, its easy to ignore the fact you have a choice in your behavior.

I've seen the prideful rationalizations like "do as you please because no one has a right to judge you."

It is a powerful tactic to close down awareness of your own projection, judging yourself, while rebellion against real or imagined judgements by others.

But if we can escape "being hated", we still have the opposite problem, how not to be a people-pleaser, and spend your interactions trying to figure out what other people want so you'll be accepted.

I imagine people anxious about others opinions may oscillate between these responses.

So I'd say real healing can't come by conforming or rebelling, but by willing to be accountable to your actual behavior, regardless of who is looking.

Not wanting people to hate me, but I am really taken aback at the fact that the Chinese government is banning puns. I rather enjoy doing the CRYPTUQUIPS in the morning because they start the day off with a good clean chuckle and/or laugh. Sometimes they are the better part of a pun, PU, but they never fail to elicit a reaction.I just hate this?????????

AO,The first step is almost always the willingness to be accountable for one's behavior. One will never learn to be truly successful until they take responsibility. I have found that people are neither as dumb as some think nor as smart as they think they are. Hate is such a wasted emotion that does more damage to the one who hates vice the object of that hate. I vowed years ago never to hate another human being or thing. Notwithstanding I have disliked a few or consider that they are not up to the requirements of that they seemed to want.QUIPTOQUIP.Sometimes one has to see the humor that is life.